food, part two

During the semester, I often cannot write here, on Ocean until close to midnight. I will have just finished dinner (yes, it comes that late on the four or five days that I spend moonlighting at the shop), put away dishes, told Ed to switch from sleeping on the couch to sleeping in a bed, turned on music, placed my laptop where it belongs – on my lap and begun the transcription of vague ideas – ones that I would have tossed around in my head while working with customers or even on a coffee break earlier at school – onto the blog.

At that hour, I drift in and out of full wakefulness. I am alert, I am not, I type a little, I wish I would think faster, more clearly, without half hour pauses of no thought at all.

Of course I am looking forward to a time when this kind of pattern is put to rest. To a time when I write, like now, with light streaming in from the south facing windows. To a time when I am sure that what I am thinking is well synchronized with what I am writing.

In the meantime, the whirligig continues. One more week of midnight posts with incomplete thoughts weighed down by heavy layers of tiredness.


Though I confess that today was a remarkable exception. How many people past the age of thirty sleep in until nearly noon? And think they could continue if guilt weren’t pushing them out of bed? Without being sick, without having partied at all the night before? For me, it’s a first.

It’s the last day of the daughter visit and each of us has a stack of work, but we take the time to go to Marigold for brunch. Because food can jumpstart a workday as much as it can calm you at its tail end.


the essentials